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Michel de MontaigneMontaigne: Selected Essays
Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1592A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaBook 2, Chapters 18, 28, and 30Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 2, Chapter 18 Summary: “Correcting”
Montaigne contends that only important or worthy people should write about themselves. Montaigne agrees and admits that his account of his own inner life is of little worth: “It is for a corner of the library, and to entertain a neighbor, a relation, a friend, who will enjoy knowing me” (177). His commitment to self-understanding is largely for his private amusement: “The most delightful pleasures are indeed absorbed within us; they flee from leaving a trace of themselves” (178).
In writing of himself, Montaigne has also altered himself: “By painting myself for others I have painted myself within, in colors brighter than they were at first” (177). It has changed his relationship to books: “I have lent a little more attentive ear to books ever since I have been on the lookout for whether I can pilfer something from them to adorn or prop up mine with” (179).
Montaigne asks, “But whom can we believe, speaking of himself, in such troubled times?” (179) Lying is commonplace, yet people take great offense when accused of it: “It seems that by resenting the accusation and getting angry at it, we rid ourselves of guilt to some extent” (179). Montaigne considers lying to be one of the worst vices: “If they deceive us, that disrupts all our relationships and dissolves all the ties that bind our society together” (180).
Strangely, the ancients commonly accuse one another of chicanery and other misdeeds without taking the insult seriously: “Their rules of duty took some other path than do ours […] We see the freedom of invective they use against each other, I mean the greatest military chiefs of either nation, in which words are avenged solely by words with no further consequence” (180).
Book 2, Chapter 28 Summary: “To Every Thing There Is a Season”
Some men, when old, suddenly take up interests more appropriate to younger men, studying languages or taking up physical culture. Education is good for anyone, “but not going to school: what a silly thing an old man learning his alphabet would be!” (183)
Montaigne has no such ambitions; old age “has deadened within me many of the desires and concerns that troubled my life; concern over the way of the world, concern for riches, for importance, for knowledge, for health, for myself” (183).
Cato the Younger, long since prepared for death, reads from Plato just before committing suicide: “[A]s a man who did not even lose sleep over the importance of such a decision, he continued his study thus without choice and change, along with the other usual activities of his life” (183).
Book 2, Chapter 30 Summary: “A Malformed Child”
Montaigne witnesses a conjoined-twin toddler, two bodies attached at the stomach with only one head, the headless portion hanging limply. All parts are healthy, but the impression is disturbing. Montaigne believes our discomfort is due to a faulty perspective. God’s work is sometimes inscrutable: “Nothing but the good, the normal, and the ordered comes from His infinite wisdom; but we do not see its agreement and relationship” (185). Further, “[w]e call ‘unnatural’ what does not usually happen. But nothing whatever is contrary to Nature” (185).
Book 2, Chapters 18, 28 and 30 Analysis
People lie, and Montaigne detests it. Yet he admits that, in writing about himself, he can’t help but alter the portrait somewhat, perhaps out of conceit. What, then, is a lie? Montaigne is one of the first modern thinkers to notice how difficult it is to make accurate self-assessments.
He also disdains the falsity of old men trying to be young again, as if denying their ultimate fate. Recent attempts to develop anti-aging technology might fall under the scope of his glare as well.
Like the essay “Cannibals,” “A Malformed Child” speaks to Montaigne’s essentially humanistic view of humanity. He would have us agree that people from foreign cultures, as well as the severely disabled, are worthy or respect, and he implies that those who disagree with our religious or political views are also to be treated civilly. That he believes all these things while standing for his Catholic religion in the face of the Protestant revolt of his era bespeaks a man of unusual open-mindedness and courage.
Of course, nothing stops him from ridiculing liars, braggarts, cowards, and fools: all are, at all times, fair game for Montaigne.
